About Chris Smith

Chris Smith, a citizen activist focused on transportation, neighborhoods and civic engagement, is the founder of PortlandTransport.com. He currently serves on the Portland Planning and Sustainability Commission and the board of Portland Streetcar Inc. His day job is as Site Architect for Xerox.com.

18 Responses to Explaining ITS

Hi Jeff — what formatting problem are you seeing? I’m currently looking at the front page and the post page with Firefox on a Mac, and don’t see any problems. Let me know what symptoms you see and what browser you’re using and I’ll check it out.

And yes, it is time for a redesign, thanks so much for volunteering. :-)

Cameron — I’ll just make the inevitable reference to “boarding rides” before anyone else does — and just leave it at that and hope everyone else just gets back to the topic of Intelligent Transportation Systems.

i couldn’t even get through the whole video. we don’t need more tricks and tech to show us how to find parking or better routes to get to our destination… those are band-aids on the problem. what we need is fewer cars on the road!

That’s part of the promise of ITS: the less time people spending driving around looking for parking/etc means lower VMT & VHT. The net effect is fewer cars on the road.

The video did a good job of showing how ITS might help by providing real-time information to travelers so they can make better decisions. It didn’t do such of a good job of showing how this will actually happen.

It didn’t do such of a good job of showing how this will actually happen.

Probably because IBM AU/NZ, the vendor and systems integrator who published this video, would just _love_ to chat with policymakers about how IBM thinks this will happen, and just what IBM products/services it will take to make it happen. :-)

When I was exposed to ITS, it was a federal program generating lots of documentation and trying to set standards (probably prematurely), while local agencies & DOTs were Just Doing It. I’m not in that loop now – does anyone know if the federal program is producing anything useful? (Now we have RITA: http://www.rita.dot.gov/about_rita/)